Well, I am still a bit under the weather. In addition to having a rather revolting cough, for the past couple of afternoons I have been getting bit of a fever (almost 38° Celsius). No worries, though: this is a “change of season” complaint that is making the rounds of many Florentine households, according to my family doctor. Ah, that probably means that Mr. Expectorate is off the hook, since I was most likely infected somewhere here…in a store, perhaps…

Anyway, it will pass in a few days, and my cats are taking good care of me (in this photo, as you can see, Priscilla is giving me a CAT scan, thanks Hanna for the suggestion hehe, while Puzzola waits patiently in the background…)…

In the meantime, my feline nurses and I are getting plenty of rest and watching some of the fabulous BBC costume dramas that I ordered from the UK last Xmas. Right now we are watching “Little Dorrit,” though I must say that my attention span is much higher than theirs (they take what I can only call “cat naps” during most of the episodes 😉 ). Ahhh, how I love those Dickens characters…

Ahhh, but now let’s get to the point of this post. This morning I came across an article of immense interest to me…particularly right now: http://tinyurl.com/24wxh6y This is not the first time I have read about fevers driving some cancer patients into spontaneous remissions, but there is more to the article than just that…so I thought I would jot down a quick post and urge you all to read it.

There is still no scientific explanation for fever-caused spontaneous regressions, but there are a couple of theories floating around, as follows (more details can be found in the article…): 1. the high fever jumpstarts the immune system, which, in its heightened state, is thus able to detect and eradicate the cancer cells; 2. the fever itself attacks and destroys the cancer.

Now, this fever-cancer eradication business hasn’t worked for me. In the spring-summer of 2006, I came down with a terrible case of pleurisy that almost killed me. I did recover…obviously!…but the high fevers unfortunately did NOT exterminate my myeloma cells. (If they had, my blog would now have a completely different title! 😉 )

Details: at the beginning of July (2006) I was still not completely over my pleurisy, but, since I hadn’t had any tests since March, I decided to go to the hospital lab for my routine tests. The results were not good at all. But then, just two months later (in September, that is), I had my tests repeated. Those were the BEST results I had had in years…and thus far I have not done better…

So this article provides some food for thought…

But right now, Pinga really wants to watch Episode Two of “Little Dorrit,” so I must go… 🙂